We’ll start here, and there’s a lot to unpack.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday announced that the state has removed over 1 million names from the Texas voter rolls, mainly people who moved out of state or died but including 6,500 who Abbott described as potential noncitizens.
“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated,” Abbott said in a statement. “We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting.”
Abbott added in a social media post that the removed names are being passed on to the attorney general’s office for possible criminal charges.
The governor’s announcement came five years after a botched attempt in 2019 to purge up to 100,000 suspected noncitizen voters led to the resignation of a Texas Secretary of State and a settlement with voting rights organizations setting parameters for future cleanups.
Ashley Harris, attorney for the ACLU of Texas, said the group has unresolved questions about the accuracy of the state’s latest data because the organization has not been allowed to review it.
Several local election officials in 2021 had warned that the state’s data continued to wrongly flag people who became citizens through naturalization.
“Gov. Abbott’s recent announcement about voter registration list maintenance lacks context, and instead points to routine voter list maintenance that does not provide evidence of wrongdoing by any voter,” Harris said. “Any attempts to point to this data as evidence of criminal wrongdoing is part of a pattern of voter intimidation and suppression by the state of Texas and certain elected officials.”
[…]
The people removed since the new law went into effect in December 2021 included: Over 6,000 who have a felony conviction, over 457,000 who are dead, over 463,000 whose addresses may have changed and who did not respond to a request for confirmation, over 134,000 who confirmed they moved, and over 19,000 who requested to cancel their registration.
Those removed from the voter rolls also include 65,000 who failed to respond to a notice requesting that they attest to their eligibility to vote after a secretary of state investigation indicated they may be ineligible.
Over 6,500 were removed because they are “potential noncitizens,” and of those, about 1,900 had cast votes in Texas elections, according to a statement from Abbott.
Inclusion on that list does not prove a person is a noncitizen, as the list includes people who failed to respond to a request from the secretary of state’s office for them to submit proof of citizenship within 30 days. Those who have recently moved may not have seen the notices.
Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said he doesn’t understand why Republicans are touting the latest numbers as a big headline. He said the number of potential noncitizens removed is “miniscule in context” with the overall registration numbers and is probably an overcount that includes naturalized citizens.
“The reason he (Abbott) and others are trying to undermine confidence in our election system is to give a reason to suppress legitimate votes through draconian legislation,” Saenz said. “And to, in advance, call into question an election outcome they don’t like. That’s what we saw in 2020.”
The Trib was also on this. We remember that 2019 purge attempt. There was another one in 2021, which led to litigation that was eventually Fifth Circuited. Some of this is indeed needless chest-thumping over normal business, but some of it has malicious intent, mostly over the “non-citizen” allegations, which are now articles of faith in the election-denial crowd. It’s hard and exhausting to always be arguing against lies and bullshit, and it has a corrosive effect that benefits the liars. It’s just where we are.
But fight we might and so we do.
Abbott’s announcement, coming just weeks before the deadline for registering to vote in the November election, has prompted confusion by voting rights groups and some Texans who say they were surprised to learn recently that they had been flagged for potential removal by their local elections offices. But most of the people identified by the governor appeared to have died or moved and not participated in recent elections, and the figures Abbott cited aren’t out of line with totals reported annually by the secretary of state’s office, according to a review by Hearst Newspapers.
Civil rights advocates have pressed for access to the underlying data behind the purges, saying they are concerned that eligible voters could be ensnared. In a letter to Secretary of State Jane Nelson on Wednesday, they specifically raised concerns that eligible voters could be getting wrongly identified as noncitizens and that ongoing removals would violate a federal “quiet period,” which prevents removals from voter rolls in the 90 days before an election.
Democratic lawmakers warned on Thursday that the removals could mirror a botched 2019 effort to remove noncitizens from the rolls, and they urged supporters to check the status of their own voter registration.
State Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, blasted state leadership for not sharing the underlying data.
“We’ve asked to see the list of the people who have been kicked off the rolls, people who have been suspended, why they were suspended,” Wu said at a news conference in Houston. “They have so far completely ignored those requests.”
A spokesperson for the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s office, which is responsible for overseeing the county’s voter rolls, said they have not carried out any sort of unusual purge of records this year.
“Records have been canceled if a voter moved out of Harris County or if we have been notified of a voter’s death,” she said.
Jacquelyn Callanen, Bexar County elections chief, said the county had conducted only its routine maintenance, removing around 40,000 names last year.
People move and people die, and there have always been processes in place to remove them from the rolls as warranted. The “non-citizens are registering to vote!” canard, goosed this year by one of the usual suspects, is dangerous in part because there are also a lot of checks in place to prevent non-citizens from getting registered, and in part because a lot of the people who end up getting flagged in the purges that Abbott likes to tout are people who registered after being naturalized for whom that data is obsolete, or just people unlucky enough to share a name and birth date with a non-citizen. You might be surprised how often that can happen in a state with 30 million people. And lest we forget, there are other bad actors out there trying to cause mayhem on their own. We don’t pay our election administrators enough.
How many people actually end up on the business end of this, and what effect it might have on turnout, are hard to know. I suspect it’s a lot more noise than consequence, but as noted above I fear the cumulative effect. Even more so, I fear the opportunity for SCOTUS to do more damage to existing voting rights, a fear that I can’t yet quantify. Check your voter registration status, hell check it for everyone you know, and let’s keep moving.
